Book Club Reflection
Themes
One of the major themes throughout all of the books was the hardships of bees.
The Bees: this story mainly focused on the bee's hardships in relation to predators such as crows, wasps, and the beekeeper.
The History of Bees: Within this story the hardship the bees seem to be facing is their own extinction via CCD.
The Beekeepers Lament: This book discussed many hardships of bees such as mites, CCD, and pesticides.
Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees: the hardship focused on within this novel was the decline in bees.
Bee Time: the main hardship that seemed to be focused on was pesticides.
Connectoins
Connections between the books
All of the books except The Bees and Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees (which both focused on the bees themselves) seemed to focus on beekeepers. The History of Bees focuses on three storylines, two were about beekeepers and one was a generation where the bees were gone. The Beekeepers Lament focused on a traveling beekeeper and his difficulties in keeping his bees alive. Bee Time discussed different aspects of beekeeping and the best methods of beekeeping.
Connections to class
The Bees: A connection I had between this book and class was the bees dancing to communicate. This was used in the book for foragers to tell other bees where to find flowers which is exactly what the documentary we watched in class said.
The History of Bees: A connection I found between this book and class was the hand pollination by humans. In the book, one of the storylines revolves around a dystopian future where people have to hand pollinate crops which as we learned in class is a real thing happening in parts of China, where the bees have gone extinct.
The Beekeepers Lament: This book is directly connected to class in that the beekeeper the book revolves around, is one of the beekeepers in the documentary we watched.
Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees: This book connected to the podcast we listened to for class because they both talked about native bee species.
Bee Time: This story connected to class in that it discussed how honey shows what pesticides have been used in the area, which relates to class when we learned about Burts Bees having to use wax and honey from Tanzania due to the U.S. and many other places being polluted with pesticides.